Pole Dancer

This winter, Frederik Paulsen, a private but by no means reclusive pharmaceutical magnate, became the first person to have journeyed to all eight of the earth’s poles. Predominant among this feat’s historical impediments was the fact that few men, if any, had ever considered it. Eight poles: who knew? Well, there are four in the north and four in the south: geographic, geomagnetic, magnetic, and least accessible-ic—that is, farthest from land, in the Arctic, and from the sea, in Antarctica. (The location of the Arctic one is disputed.)

Paulsen, who is sixty-two, lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. His ancestors were Frisian whale hunters and sailors; he’s got the frigid zones in his bones. His father, a doctor, fled Nazi Germany for Malmö, Sweden, and founded Ferring, a pharmaceutical company, which Frederik took over and built into a pioneer in the development of peptides. Forbes estimates his net worth at five billion dollars. He has an array of obsessions, many of them philanthropic. One is demographic decline in Russia; every other year, he opens a new fertility clinic in a different Russian city. (Vladimir Putin has awarded him the Order of Friendship.) Another is invasive species: he has funded a rat-eradication campaign on South Georgia Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. He is the world’s foremost acquirer of textiles from Bhutan, which he donates to the Royal Textile Academy in Thimphu. He owns the historical archives of Greenland.

In 1999, he began travelling regularly to the polar regions, ginning up three or four expeditions a year. “When you visit the Arctic once, you’re hooked,” he said the other day. “The thirst for new experiences takes over your life.” He loves the logistics, the hardship, the time spent in ice-encrusted tents with men as crazy as he is. “I’d prefer to go to jail than sit around on a sixty-metre yacht with six Russian blond girls,” he said. “Well, not the first two days.”

Paulsen has walked, motored, flown, and skied to the poles. He and his regular Sancho Panza, a mountain guide and polar explorer named François Bernard, were the first to fly an Ultralight across the Bering Strait, from Alaska to Russia. In 2007, he and five other men dived to the bottom of the sea directly beneath the ice cap at the North Pole, some fourteen thousand feet deep, in a pair of Russian bathyspheres. Down below, hovering above the shrimpy mud, he and his companions realized that they were at the point on the planet which is closest to the center of the earth. They wondered what might be the farthest. The planet’s most protuberant point, it turned out, is the summit of Mt. Chimborazo, in Ecuador. In 2011, Paulsen and a team attempted to climb it, but foul weather forced them to turn back.

In January, just for fun, Paulsen, Bernard, and seven friends skied the last latitudinal degree to the South Pole. They spent a week hauling sleds laden with food and gear a hundred and ten kilometres. Then Paulsen, with a small group, flew to the coast, boarded a ship, and sailed out into the sea toward Tasmania. About two hundred nautical miles out, they passed over the magnetic pole—his eighth and final pole. Amid the heaving swells of the Great Southern Ocean, they drank champagne.

Not long ago, this crew, plus a few of Paulsen’s other polar companions, convened in New York for the annual Explorers Club gala. Paulsen was to be named an honorary director. Prior to the gala, he held a small reception in the Duke of Windsor room at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Russians wore tuxedos. Among them were an oligarch’s deputy, who insisted that his name not be used, a freight-company chairman named Dmitry Pourim, and an impish fellow named Gennady Terekhov (“He’s involved in harbor traffic, let’s put it like that,” Paulsen said), who was showing off iPad photographs of himself in the cockpit of a fighter jet. “I am pilot,” he said. Paulsen’s son, a lanky young man in a red velvet bow tie, introduced a short film he’d made during the trip, which featured Gennady—“the Russian Brad Pitt,” the son said, though he looked more like a Russian Joe Pesci—smoking cigarettes in barren landscapes, fighting with zippers, and sliding across the ice on his belly, to the strains of Adele.

Tall, meaty, and a little tousled, Paulsen had the brisk, offhand air of a geeky duke. He drily recounted narrow escapes: “In 2002, we flew to the South Pole in an Antonov An-3.” This was a cumbersome Soviet-era single-engine biplane, loaded with Russian dignitaries and a few of Paulsen’s friends. They’d shipped the plane in pieces to Antarctica inside a cargo jet, reassembled it on land, and set off for the Pole. There was thick fog. The Russians drank brandy. The wings iced over. The electric power went out. Someone had a G.P.S. device on a key ring, and the crew used it to guide the vessel back down through the fog. By the time they reached the Pole, they’d run out of fuel. “The Americans gave us benzene for the trip home,” Paulsen said. “And then the engine exploded.” He had the smile of a man who eats worms. ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.